Donella Meadows Quotes

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing.

Our society is intertwined with the economy that we've built, which is a fantastically complex system. I hope that my writing about it might do some good, but that's not why I do it.

The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.

A lot of things can't be modeled very well.

One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.

The only positive finding which could be drawn from the first series, was the conclusion that the relationships obviously had a more complicated lay-out than had been thought, for the effects were so varied that no obedience to any law could be discovered.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated.

Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.

We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy.

All models are false but some models are useful

Correct" is a property of small systems.

We think that computer models represent reality especially if we developed the models.

We are much better at creating complex technologies than we are at controlling them.

When it comes to health care, … the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical profession are well mobilized and understand the complexity of the system far better than the public at large, making them powerful obstacles to change.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Increasing cyber-physical system complexity brings security challenges as well as privacy challenges.

As we get sucked more and more into the technosphere, we become less and less capable of understanding it because it becomes a technological milieu that we're in.

Scaling is multidimensional. Different methods address different things.

When you have large systems, it becomes almost impossible to make even very simple changes.